creative-arts therapy

Arts-based therapies are often used to supplement more “traditional” eating disorder treatment protocols in various different settings, ranging from individual therapy to inpatient units. However, as Frisch, Franko & Herzog (2006) note, no published research provides empirical support for the use of arts-based therapies for eating disorder treatment.

You might be wondering: if there is no empirical support, why are clinicians still using these therapeutic practices? You might also be wondering why I’ve chosen to dissect an article from 2006.

I’ll address the first question in this post (teaser: it’s really hard to say!). As for my delving back into the depths of academia, there is surprisingly little literature that touches on arts-based therapy, despite its continued use. This article provides an overview of why this might be, and where we can go from here.

The idea of including dance and movement in interventions for eating disorders may seem somewhat controversial; generally, exercise and physical activity are discouraged for individuals recovering from eating disorders. Including dance in therapeutic interventions might raise a few eyebrows given the links between appearance-oriented athletic endeavors such as ballet and gymnastics and the development of eating disorders.

However, some therapists and scholars interested in alternative therapies for eating disorders have suggested that certain forms of movement therapy may help individuals with eating disorders connect to their bodies in a different, more positive way.

In 2011, two such scholars from Portugal, Padrão & Coimbra, published a 6-month pilot intervention for individuals hospitalized for anorexia nervosa (AN) based around body movement.

Their aims were twofold:

Find out more about the links between body movement and bodily experience in individuals with AN

Definitioner

body image

one’s sense of the self and one’s body (14)

alexithymia

a disturbance in affective and cognitive function that overlaps diagnostic entities but is common is psychosomatic disorders, addictive disorders, and post traumatic stress disorder; the chief manifestations are difficulty in describing or recognizing one’s own emotions, a limited fantasy life, and general constriction in the affective life (14)

effectiveness

the extent to which a specific intervention, when used under ordinary circumstances, does what it is intended to do; clinical trials that assess effectiveness are sometimes called pragmatic or management trials (2)

sample size

the number of subjects assigned to a treatment condition in an experiment or study (8)

sample

a subgroup selected from a larger group of potential subjects (population) (8)